Double Blind

While the BC Ferries strike was making all of the media headlights, this gave the Translink board the perfect (stealth) opportunity to approve a tax for all residents of the lower mainland to the tune of $2.4 billion over the three years between 2005 to 2007. You can read about the report by clicking on Translink’s 10-year outlook. While reading this report, I was utterly disgusted at what seems to be a fundamental lack of one assumption: people will overwhelmingly choose to take their cars to work every day.

If you take a look at the report’s executive summary, there is a suite of improvements concerning bus service, the Skytrain and the Seabus. In particular, Richmond will finally see a much-needed link to Vancouver via Skytrain and Coquitlam will get connected to the Skytrain via the Lougheed Mall station. They will be spending about $800M on these two projects alone. I think this is a good use of capital expenditures, especially since there is a guaranteed amount of commuters that will take the line. Skytrain in these areas will essentially replace the “B-line” bus routes that are currently in place. This will enable Translink to concentrate on what they are seriously lacking in, which is suburb to suburb traffic. In particular, service from Richmond to Burnaby and back is horrible. This will be rectified with the expansion of the Skytrain westward from the Commercial Drive station which should end at an underground station on or very near the corner of Granville Street and Broadway.

While Skytrain cannot possibly match up with a real underground subway system that cities like New York, Moscow and London have, it is the next best alternative for moving people around. A “poor man’s tube” so to speak. Skytrain is automated, been proven to be very safe, and quite reliable. The area of Vancouver west of Granville Street will never see Skytrain due to the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) factor, but they’ll just have to live with just-as-noisy busses instead.

My problem with the spending is that it doesn’t reflect the real goal of any transportation plan: to ensure that people (and to a lesser degree cargo) can move around the city in an efficient (i.e. speedy) manner. This is done by maximizing the volume of traffic that can travel from city to city in the regional district. If there is too much traffic on the streets, the road network becomes saturated and then everything stops moving.

Skytrain is good – the ability of Skytrain to move people around is not dependent on the number of cars in the fleet, nor is it dependent on the amount of people that use the service. It is a completely scalable transportation solution with a cap on maximum capacity that is not a forseeable issue in the future. This is why I do not mind spending my tax dollars on such a service even though I probably will not use it most of the time.

My problem is the road network – there isn’t a sufficient network of high-volume roads that can move traffic to and from Vancouver efficiently. There is one freeway (Highway 1) clipping the northeastern side of the city, and this freeway only benefits those that come to the city from the eastern suburbs (Langley, Abbotsford). Additionally, if you wish to connect to this freeway from Richmond or south of Richmond, you have to take Highway 99 northwards, and then Highway 91 east until you reach New Westminster, where you will have to then face about 20 minutes of traffic before you can connect to Highway 1. This is seriously inefficient. There is also no effective way to connect traffic to the downtown core of Vancouver. The Translink plan makes no attempt at addressing these issues.

Instead, the bulk of the budget for roads ($600M out of approximately $800M) has been devoted towards a toll bridge crossing of the Fraser River from Pitt Meadows to Langley. While this crossing is needed (and would relieve stress on the Albion Ferry to the east and the Port Mann Bridge on Highway 1 to the west), this doesn’t address this simple problem: Vancouver doesn’t have a real freeway network.

Back before I was born, in 1959 city planners realized that population and driver growth would result in the saturation of the existing road grid. Their solution was to implement a freeway system (similar to what Los Angeles and practically every other metropolitan jurisdiction in North America did) in anticipation of growth. There was a public outcry, and then the Vancouver council made the decision that there shall be no freeways constructed in the city. Fourty five years later, traffic is of course worse and there is not any point driving downtown from 7am to 7pm since what should be a 20 minute drive will actually be over an hour if you’re coming from Richmond or Burnaby. To discourage people from coming to the city with their car, the city has to implement pathetically high parking taxes (1 hour at a parking meter downtown costs $4) and this kills commerce since nobody wants to shop there because they can’t park their cars anywhere. What do they do instead? Park their cars in Metrotown in Burnaby and shop there.

But why can’t (or rather, why don’t) people that don’t live near a skytrain station take transit? Because the busses use the same road network as cars do and thus the busses get to their final destinations slower than you would otherwise had you taken your car in the first place! The solution to this is to develop a high-volume freeway system so that vehicles could get from point A to point B quickly. In this case, this meant from everywhere else in the lower mainland to downtown.

What the report suggested was that a minimal freeway network be constructed:

The thin white lines is a sketch of part of the Greater Vancouver Regional District. The solid thick white lines is what the minimalistic freeway plan suggested constructed for 1985. The dotted blue is existing freeway in 2004. Observe one extra freeway that was never proposed originally was constructed – Highway 91 connecting Richmond to Surrey and New Westminster.

What is missing between today’s reality in 2004 and the 1985 plan is the freeway link between the Oak Street Bridge and downtown Vancouver (this would carry the majority of traffic from Richmond to Vancouver); the west-east links between downtown Vancouver and Highway 1 (via Hastings and Broadway/12th streets); and the ‘wrap-around’ freeway where Beach Avenue is today in downtown that would take traffic to North Vancouver – little did they know that the Lion’s Gate Bridge would still be three lanes in 45 years!

When you drive in the Lower Mainland, this is exactly what you observe is missing: There is no easy way to get from Richmond to Vancouver; there is no easy way to get from downtown to Highway 1, and there is no easy way to get from Richmond to Highway 1. All these routes involve multiple traffic lights and congestion. What happens is that Granville, Oak and Knight street take all the north-south traffic to and from Richmond; Hastings and Broadway take most of the west-east traffic to and from downtown to Highway 1. Each of these streets has around 20 traffic lights from origin to destination.

Now what is interesting is that the Translink plan is attempting to replace both the North-South freeway deficiency to and from Richmond with Skytrain, and the West-East deficiency (the northern one) with Skytrain. They are not correcting the root problem, which is the lack of highspeed controlled access freeways in these areas!

The other two issues in Vancouver’s transportation plan is Highway 1 and Highway 7 (Lougheed Highway). I will cover these one at a time.

Highway 1 handles all the traffic coming from Surrey, Langley and Abbotsford and has a massive bottleneck at the Fraser River crossing, the Port Mann Bridge. Currently, this bridge has three lanes going eastward and two lanes going westward. Think about this for a moment – a freeway that has to service 120,000 cars each day has two lanes heading westward into the city.

Highway 7 handles the traffic from Maple Ridge, Port Coquitlam and Mission. This highway is heavily congested during rush hour (although nowhere near as bad as Highway 1), but growth is highly anticipated in this region. This highway needs will need to be converted into a freeway to handle the traffic density. Unfortunately, the resulting traffic will just end up in Highway 1 west, but thankfully it will be after the Port Mann Bridge.

Unfortunately, I don’t see any spending initiatives where it really counts: More roads. Establishing the next best thing, Skytrain in the major transit routes from Richmond to Vancouver and from Coquitlam to Lougheed will help keep the busses off the road (and thus keep our roads more free for regular commuter traffic), but these sparse improvements will not nearly be sufficient to address the huge transportation issues that this region has. For now, I hope your car engine idles well while you wait to get on the Port Mann.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 28th, 2003 and is filed under Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.